Welcome to Palestine 2012 - International Initiative

Following the success of the 'flytilla' earlier this year, a new international initiative is under way for people from all around the world to come and visit Palestine in Easter 2012.

Join Welcome to Palestine 2012, which begins on Sunday April 15th with flights from many international airports to Occupied Palestine, by necessity via Tel Aviv Airport in Israel.

Add your name and that of your organisation, trade union, campaign group, church, etc., to list of signatories endorsing the attached appeal. Forward the Appeal to other human rights supporters

"We, the undersigned, endorse the call from the Welcome to Palestine 2012 initiative for supporters of Palestinian human and national rights around the world to openly visit Palestine during Easter 2012. There is no way into Palestine other than through Israeli control points. Israel has turned Palestine into a giant prison, but prisoners have a right to receive visitors.

Welcome to Palestine 2012 will again challenge Israel's policy of isolating the West Bank while the settler paramilitaries and army commit brutal crimes against a virtually defenceless Palestinian civilian population.

We call on governments to support the right of Palestinians to receive visitors and the right of their own citizens to visit Palestine openly.

The participants in Welcome to Palestine 2012 ask to be allowed to pass through Tel Aviv airport without hindrance and to proceed to the West Bank to take part in a project there for children to benefit from the right to education."

"You cannot simplify the question of violence.. You look at human history - the American revolution, the civil war, the end of slavery in the United States, the African National Congress, the end of colonialism - by and large these were some combination of popular social uprisings and social movements and non-violent protests AND armed resistance. Now that doesn't mean I'm advocating for any armed action today, I'm not. I'm committed to finding ways of acting and speaking and making people laugh and doing art and disrupting the war machine in other ways, but I think focusing on violence when we have the comfort of being protected by mass of armed violence is not non-violence at all.. if you are pointing to the mass of violence and who's doing the mass of violence in the world today, you have to look to state violence - that's people bombing whole cities from the air.. "